A smart, charming debut.
A Pakistani exchange student does her best to adjust to American life in this witty coming-of-age story.
“There’s a strain of story this could fall into,” says Hira, the narrator of Amna’s debut novel. “The foreigner trying to fit in, hindered by accent and Fahrenheit and the Imperial system….The entranced documenter of America. The truth—I was bloody bored.” Hira, 16 when the novel begins, is a stranger in a not-so-strange land—she’s come from Pakistan to rural Oregon on a student exchange program. She’s heard plenty about the U.S. (“Lord, it was 2010, and everyone knew about America, the place that would upsell you on the thread count for your deathbed”), though she isn’t quite prepared for life in the tiny town of Lakeview, where her host mother, Kelly, lives with her high school–aged daughter, Amy. Hira befriends a few people at her new school, including Hamid, an Omani exchange student who’s fonder of the States than she is: “He was only mystified by the country, while I had also decided to be offended by it at every possible turn.” While Hira starts to get used to the U.S., befriending members of her school’s volleyball team, she finds herself both missing and resenting her parents, and things take a turn when tragedy strikes her family not long after she’s diagnosed with tuberculosis, forcing her to quarantine in Kelly’s house. In Hira, Amna has created a fascinating character, prickly but still vulnerable, in search of something but unsure what that might be: “I was tired of limits, aghast that life could be so small,” she reflects. Amna’s novel is a perceptive look at what home means—“It is the sole landscape of dreams, the only place that will ever convince you that its failings, its bounties, its excesses, and caresses are all your own. After all, where does it end and you begin?” This is a funny and affecting novel, understated but powerful, a wonderful new spin on the coming-of-age story.
A smart, charming debut.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-9509-9449-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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